Marie Lloyd, the famous music-hall singer, died at her home in Golders Green at midnight on Friday. She had a serious illness some time ago, and it was only lately that she returned to the stage. She appeared as recently as last Tuesday at the Edmonton Empire.

Matilda Alice Victoria Lloyd, born in 1870, had to be reckoned with at once in any survey of the English music hall. It might be said that she had grown up with its older tradition – and, with equal truth, that she had refused to grow up with it, for she retained to the end a basic humour that had its roots in the older music-hall which counted a chairman and liquor glasses as part of its inevitable furniture.

Leader comment: "Our Marie"

In her early teens MARIE LLOYD found that she had a gay, realist philosophy to express, and its call took her right across the English-speaking world, eastwards to Australia and westward to the States; but she is dead now, and there can he no doubt that Hackney is still written on her heart.

Life planted its first impress upon her in a London slum, and she spent her years in translating that first impression into terms of art. Hers was a world in which progress, industrialism, economic necessity (the term may be varied but the fact remains) had swept away leisure and starved out beauty, in which men were so poor and their livelihood so hazardous that they had scarcely learnt to think and never learnt to save.

Only one thing had been left them from the shipwreck of the old rural world – a dogmatic belief that life was somehow thoroughly worth while.

So, when the pitiful conditions hemming them in permitted them for a moment to pause, they stepped back, looked the surface of things in the face, and laughed. MARIE LLOYD was this laugh.

Being an artist with a touch of genius, she raised echoes in many alien hearts, and she was soon lifted into wealth, even into luxury. But she adhered to the culture from which she took her inspiration. She gave pretty gross offence, at times, to delicate ears. It is said that she never bothered to save money, money being meant to be shared with "pals." What she had she scattered, according to report, among her friends, among lame dogs, among the orchestra that helped her through with her songs.

She had earned three, four, even five hundred pounds a week, and she has died in debt. She was the philosopher of urban London's Saturday night. "The boy that I love sits up in the gallery," she used to sing; and she meant it. The gallery had borne her and brought her up, and she knew no other gods.